Why you should care

The headlines stumble on and wearyingly on, and the episodes they mark hew to a similar narrative line: Someone, very possibly someone Black or Latino, crosses paths with a police officer, and that someone, very possibly Black or Latino, comes out much the worse for wear. In the almost-year since Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Missouri — not the first such shooting but the first of this most recent string, and also sadly not the last — solutions to police shootings of people who didn’t need to be shot have gone from sputter to nonexistent.

But our fix is so simple that we’re kicking ourselves for not having thought of it before: policing made-to-order. Citizens of color should have the choice to interact with cops of the same racial or cultural background. In practical terms, it would look like this: An African-American driver is pulled over for, say, not signaling a lane change. The attending officer will, in the spirit of good public service, ask the driver if she’d be more comfortable with an African-American police officer. If so? Then the attending police officer calls it in and sits with the citizen until an African-American officer shows up.

Efficient? Since it could add as much as an hour to the traffic-stop process, no. But patience is a virtue, and we’d prefer people be allowed to choose inefficiency rather than to have the default be brutality. Indeed, waiting would likely healthily gum up the fear-based, adrenaline-powered works that encourage escalation. Besides, plenty of times in criminal law enforcement, we choose inefficiency. Women who are sexually assaulted, for instance, are sometimes given the option of conducting their interviews with a female officer. It’s not convenient, but it’s better policing: The theory here is that a female officer will be more understanding and less threatening, and that this might matter a great deal to a woman who has been victimized by a man.

Besides which, it just seems like good business to give members of the tax-paying public the choice, when stopped, to get the most evenhanded, sympathetic hearing possible. And good business for cops too: Wrongful death lawsuits don’t exactly help police officers, police departments or the municipalities that ultimately foot the bill. But for gateway traffic issues it seems tailor-made. At least to us.

To be sure, race-based policing might not work with violent crimes and criminals. A 12-year veteran of a police force in Northern California, who asked that his name not be used, thought the idea was ridiculous. Cops who work in crime-ridden neighborhoods “don’t have time for stupid shit like this,” he said. “Not when a traffic stop for a brake light might yield a pound of coke.” And it’s fair to wonder exactly where we’ll find all of these Black and Latino cops: While U.S. police forces are much more diverse than in previous generations — about 1 in 4 officers today is not white, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and 12 percent are Black — it’s also the case, almost everywhere, that people of color are more likely to be traffic-stopped than white people.

There are also questions about whether “segregated” policing would be good for society. But realistically speaking, considerations about the “perfect America” mean nothing to me when facing cops with guns drawn after I’ve rolled through a stop sign. And, oh yeah: Three of the Baltimore cops involved in the death of Freddie Gray were African-American. So it’s not clear at all that racially representative police forces can fix the “relationships that are strained in so many cities across the U.S. right now,” argued Cara E. Rabe Hemp, a criminal justice professor at Illinois State University, in a recent phone call. “Especially when use-of-force problems are pretty consistently caused by a small and known number of officers.”